Thursday, January 16, 2014

Greensboro Truth Commission by Jonathan Scott Holloway

Even though Greensboro, N.C. long prided itself as being a
beacon of progress in the history of race relations, according to some local
activists the city has never come to terms with a spectacular moment of
violence and seeing racial horror that happened as the city approached the
twenty-year anniversary of the sit-in triumphs.

On November 3, 1979, the Communist Worker’s Party (CWP), a
group made up primarily of activists from outside Greensboro, organized a Death
to the Klan rally and invited members of the Ku Klux Klan to attend and respond
to the CWP’s critique. The Klan, joined by members of the Nazi Party, took up
the CWP’s challenge and, after an altercation with CWP marchers, opened fired
on the activists. Five protestors were killed in the shootout, and many more
were injured. Most Greensboro citizens were horrified, and their dismay
increased when nine months later an all-white jury acquitted the defendants despite
overwhelming evidence that the accused had killed the marchers.

In the heat of the moment, city leaders declared that the
violence was coincidental to Greensboro itself, since virtually none of the
individuals involved were from the greater Greensboro area. The CWP knew it
could garner attention for its struggle to organize workers in the local
textile industry while addressing what it viewed as the linked problems of
racial and economic injustice by invoking Klan racism. In this way, CWP
activists understood that race continued to be a live wire in the post-civil
rights South. Although they certainly did not seek out the violence that
resulted, the labor organizers knew it would be easy to goad the Klan into some
sort of confrontation. So much of the South was built on these kinds of horrors.

Twenty years after the November clash, a coalition of
progressive Greensboro activists called for a truth and reconciliation commission
–the first in the United States –in order to answer the questions, “What if
American cities – especially Southern cities –stopped ignoring the skeletons in
their closets? What if they were inspired by the potential of the truth
&reconciliation model as demonstrated in South Africa, Peru, and elsewhere,
to help them seek life-affirming restorative justice and constructively deal
with past incidents of injustice?” Although the subsequently formed Greensboro
Truth and Reconciliation Commission (GTRC) had no subpoena power and could not
redistribute resources or reallocate justice, the GTRC believed it important to
address the festering pain of the shooting, the subsequent trial, and more
fundamentally, the long-tem silence in the community about racial, economic, and
social injustice that led up to and the followed the violence.

The commission clearly believed its work was productive,
even if in the process old wounds reopened. When it published its final report
in May 2006, the GTRC used the words of legal scholar Martha Minow as the lead
epigraph: “Failure to remember, collectively, triumphs and accomplishments
diminishes us. But failure to remember, collectively, injustice and cruelty is
an ethical breach. It implies no responsibilities and no commitment to prevent
inhumanity in the future. Even worse, failures of collective memory stoke fires
of resentment and revenge.” The GTRC recognized that the scale of the
atrocities that called other truth commissions into being was different from
what even the most skeptical and hardened activists would claim in Greensboro,
but the GTRC hoped that its work remained a timely reminder “of the importance of
facing shameful events honestly and acknowledging the brutal consequences of
political pin, calculated blindness, and passive ignorance.”

Although the efficacy of the GTRC report is unclear –some local
business and civic leaders still think the violence in 1979 did not reflect
Greensboro’s social interactions and core values, and they also feel that the
GTRC only stirred up trouble for the sake of stirring up trouble – it appears
that the spirit of the report is at least figuratively found in the city’s
International Civil Rights Museum’s Hall of Shame. That room, with its jagged
and searing reminders of the ugliness in our recent pasty, and the Hall of
Courage that follows soon after remind us that the fight for a just and better
world cannot happen without a sincere and thorough engagement with the past.